


The Anti-Hero and Leander

by elviaprose



Category: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-26
Updated: 2013-07-26
Packaged: 2017-12-21 10:14:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/899113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elviaprose/pseuds/elviaprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In certain respects, Bunny is a more seasoned criminal than Raffles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Anti-Hero and Leander

Raffles did not at first question how I had come to be so hard up, and I might have escaped his suspicion forever had I managed, before renewing our acquaintance, to cure myself of the unfortunate and unfailing habit of betraying my own cause. I realized, when my whirling thoughts had calmed, that by mere luck I had led him to an inference that had kept him from the question. He had seen me wager away nearly two hundred that March night, and he must have taken my behavior to be exemplary. It was not.

As it so happened, I aroused his suspicion when I called on him to ask, long before I should have done, when next I might expect to lend a hand.

"Bunny, my boy, surely you cannot be so keen. You are in funds again, after all!"

I protested that I was indeed, but my face gave me the lie.

"But you cannot be hard up again so soon," he murmured.

"I am!" I cried, unable to contain my misery. "You never asked why it was I was so infernally hard up in the first place. You should have done, by Jove. I cannot believe you did not." 

"Then I ask you now," said Raffles, the cold beam of his eye as piercing as it had ever been. 

I admit I quaked before him, but I consoled myself that he had not deserted me in my darkest hour and that I would not hate him were he to spill the tale I was about to spill to him. 

"Raffles," I began. "You did not witness my first crime."

Raffles looked at me with astonishment. For a moment I rejoiced to see him look at me with such fascination, but then the fear returned. 

"Did I really not, old chap? You cannot mean--"

"I am a sodomite!" I burst out, my eyes welling with tears. "I wrote letters--I was a fool--and now every month I must pay more…every month! To keep them out of sight!" 

Raffles looked still more surprised. I believe I had shocked him out of speech. 

“Well, what do you say to that?” I cried.

"Well, Bunny,” said he, his eyes beginning to gleam, “I say it would be a grand lark if we took that letter of yours from under his nose. “Tell me everything, and we shall do it soon enough. Blackmailers of that low sort are seldom well off—I don’t suppose he will have anything else to interest me, do you?”

My letter was in the hands of one Edmond Matthias, cousin of one Leander Matthias, with whom I’d had a brief affair just after finishing up at school. While a guest in his uncle’s house, Edmond Matthias had abused his hospitality to snatch poor Leander’s letters from under his nose. He had subsequently used those letters to place the both of us among the unhappiest sodomites in London. Edmond Matthias was not so well off as his cousin, and I do believe, poor soul, that he had real need of my money—the ever-mounting sums he had demanded seemed a sure sign of his increasingly dire finances. 

I told Raffles as much, my voice thin with nerves, at the first, but growing stronger as Raffles listened intently and without prejudice. 

“My, my,” murmured Raffles, filling every pause in my tale.

“I wonder what he should do without my letters to support him. To my knowledge, he has no friend of extraordinary nerve and talent to lead him into a life of thieving,“ I said, trying to make a joke of it.

“Never you mind that, Bunny,” he said, fixing me with a slow, sly smile. How he could smile and smile and be a villain! Yet he smiled for my sake.

*** 

As it so happened, Leander Matthias was marrying. I had received an invitation, which I had not planned to accept. 

“But you shall accept, Bunny,” said Raffles.

“Shall I?” I asked. 

“Of course, Bunny! You must not seem to be taking the marriage hard, you know.”

I protested, but Raffles would hear none of it, and so I found myself at his wedding.

Matthias was merely one of many men with whom I had dallied in my three years out of school, and he was rather a dull sort, but upon seeing his dull eye fixed upon another, I felt the loss keenly. I reflected bitterly that as I was not a Hero but a villain—a cheat, a liar, a thief, and a sodomite, I deserved to have no Leander. 

I did little but drink, eat, and make word play out of my misfortunes. I drifted absently through conversation upon conversation, babbling this and that nonsense. Basil Hallward was there, and I asked after our mutual friend Lord Henry, who was as always very well and very busy saying the most terribly immoral and shocking things, which Basil was at pains to assure me his Lordship did not really believe to be in any way true. I had no opinion to offer on the matter. After too much drink, I found my unsteady way back to my rooms.

“Raffles!” I cried, upon finding him there. “What ever are you doing here?”

“Only returning something of yours to you, Bunny,” he replied, pressing a bundle of letters into my hand. They were the very letters! 

“The letters!” I cried, excitement piercing the haze of drink. “But how have you done it? And why did you not tell me what you planned? I might have helped you.” 

“It was positively a one man job, my dear Bunny,’ Raffles said coolly. “And it’s very well Edmond Matthias saw you gazing mournfully upon his cousin all night and knows you are innocent of taking back the letters as well as—“ and here he reached into his pocket and withdrew a handful of cufflinks and an engraved pocket watch, “the paltry contents of his safe, which finding broken he shall go to the police about.” 

I was overcome with such mixed emotions I knew not what to do. 

“Raffles!” I cried “How shall I thank you?”

“Well, Bunny,” Raffles fixed me with an appraising eye. “We are each of us, it would seem, the master of an art. Mine is burglary—that is not to say I am a burglar, of course, but I know something of the art--while yours, I daresay, is buggery.” 

“Raffles!” I cried again, this time with less pleasure.

“I have made you my accomplice and apprentice in my art. If you do not do the same for me in yours, I must call you an ungrateful rabbit.” Raffles’s face betrayed little indeed—no mischief, mockery, nor even desire. “I suggest we begin my education forthwith, if you’ve no objection. But I must warn you, I know positively nothing of this; you must teach me everything, my boy.“

I flushed, too surprised for a moment to feel glad. 

“Only command me, Bunny, what I must do, and I will say ‘I obey.’”

I need not have been told twice. 

So unsurprised was he at my commands, so skilled, and so fully in command of himself while committing unspeakable acts upon me that I could not but wonder that day, and in the days and months and years that followed in his company, if he was not as long experienced in this sterile love as I. Perhaps he merely enjoyed playing the part of my diligent pupil, for there flashed sometimes in his eye, even upon those occasions upon which I ventured so far as to take a cane to him, or to bind him to my bed, a kind of gleam to suggest he was having his fun with me. But Raffles being the man he is, I count it nearly equally likely that his natural aptitude for criminal activities extended even so far as that.

**Author's Note:**

> Basil Hallward and Henry Wotton belong neither to Hornung nor to me. They are Oscar Wilde's inventions.


End file.
